Founder/Director -

Dr. Susan Allen, founder and director of RZHRG, has been working in Rwanda since 1986. She earned her undergraduate and medical degrees at Duke University, and completed her Masters of Public Health degree at the University of California-Berkeley. After residency at UC-San Francisco, Dr. Allen received a research grant to study the seroprevalence of HIV among pregnant women in Kigali, Rwanda. Since then, she has lived and worked primarily in Rwanda, and in Zambia conducting HIV research. Dr. Allen’s work spans the policy, socio-demographic, behavioral, clinical and laboratory aspects of heterosexual HIV prevention, opportunistic infections, and family planning. Today, she divides her time between Atlanta and Africa, where she leads healthcare teams at Projet San Francisco in Kigali and the Zambia Emory HIV Research Project (ZEHRP) in Lusaka and Ndola, Zambia. She is a professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, with additional appointments in Global Health, Epidemiology, Obstetrics and Gynecology, and Infectious Diseases.